Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday May 13, 2012 @09:03PM
from the pay-me-in-certified-adulons dept.

CNET reports that Facebook has experimented lately with a small group of users by offering people the chance to promote their own account status messages the old-fashioned way: by paying for them. The author of the linked article asks whether it's inevitable that "Facebook will have to start dinging users in earnest," post-IPO. Facebook still says "It's free and always will be," but that doesn't rule out paying for additional features — that's certainly a model that many game makers had adopted.

Just a heads-up. Your post that aren't showing up -- that's because your friends asked facebook to stop showing them. Then when you noticed they were like, "I don't know, why didn't see it? Oh man, facebook is so weird. Hiding stuff for _NO REASON_"

Umm, no. I don't see things that my wife posts. She'll be sitting at the desk next to mine and tell me she posted some pictures or whatever and there will be nothing in my feed. I can wait a while and refresh the feed and still nothing. If I go to her profile, there they are. I have no idea why this happens. and it happens seemingly at random with only some of her posts. It's hard to check if it happens with everyone, since I only have a few Facebook friends and it's not like I'm regularly checking their profiles to see if they've posted other things I don't see. I'm subscribed to "All Updates".

> 2012> Still not being able to easily leverage tech for simple things.
Screw 3rd party Data Silos. You only use them because utilising your tech hasn't been made easy enough yet. As a coder I feel partly responsible, and am working to fix this as one of my life's goals...

If only giving freedoms and removing limitations was as profitable as imposing limits and removing capabilities.

Are you sorting your news feed by "Most Recent" or "Top Stories"? For me "Top Stories" means the same five people's crap keeps showing up, to the exclusion of anything newer by anyone else. Last I checked there's no setting to default to "Most Recent", so I need to remember to manually change it every time I go to my feed page.

I have several former coworkers that now work for Facebook. The fact that the vast majority of posts you would find interesting are now hidden is a bug with their new sorting algorithm. They're still working on it. For now, one friend recommended using the old "Most Recent" feature instead of the broken "Top Stories" feature. My feed is 90+% Cityville crap even though I have the game blocked.

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

Oh man, but that's so much work, logging into your email account and, uh....look, fuck you buddy. We need to use Facebook! We must use it for everything!!!!! I don't even remember how to dial a phone anymore it's been so long! What are these numbers, and how do you dial someone's Facebook account?!?!! DURRRRRRRRRRR

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

Sorry you had to go through that. Honestly. But you know what? If I went into the hospital for emergency surgery anyone I wanted to know would know. I don't have a facebook account. And I'd never create one and expect it to act as a tool to disseminate critical information. It was important to you that people knew but you relied on a mechanism that is geared towards monetizing you and if it works for you all the better. If it doesn't, oh well. Not like you can sue them over it.

I'm not trying to be harsh, and I do feel for you. Next time, use the phone (you had time to post to facebook, all it takes is one phone call to spread the word....)

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

It was important to you that people knew but you relied on a mechanism that is geared towards monetizing you and if it works for you all the better. If it doesn't, oh well. Not like you can sue them over it.

A social network is for being social. Posting an update that one is in hospital, with the hope of hearing some nice things from one's friends and family is a social activity whether you yourself would do so or not. Sure it isn't the only mechanism to disseminate information but it is a mechanism that people can reasonably expect should work on the largest social networking provider in existence at the moment.

Indeed. But if it doesn't work, no one has any obligation or reason to use it, so in other words, they very much do have an obligation to work and provide the expected service, or go the way of Myspace.

I think that's the point of the whole thread. Facebook is already headed the way of Myspace. Seriously. All but about 10% of the people I know have abandoned facebook already. Sure, they still have accounts, but no one is posting there anymore, and they're only checking for activity ~monthly.

It really is liberating. I realized that the frequency of a person's posts on Facebook was inversely proportional to whether they were actually worth reading long ago.

Although, in the interests of full disclosure, I've always thought social networking was fucking retarded. I never join them of my own volition, it's always after a ton of family and friends harasses the shit out of me about my lack of an account, and then when I finally do sign up, I lose interest within days. Funny considering I can lurk

And yet, there is craigslist. No I'm not saying it's an alternative to facebook, I'm pointing out how amazingly user-centered it has remained. In fact "earnest" might even be a better word. Thank you Craig Newmark.

Those are interesting stats, and I would never claim running a huge website was cheap or free. But you argued that a large site must place making money as their #1 priority, but that's not consistent with craiglist's website design, business practices, and public statements [businessinsider.com]:

CEO Jim Buckmaster, who is about to celebrate his 11th year in charge, told the Guardian,"any extra profit accrued is an unintended secondary consequence."
The 11th most popular site in the United States and the 37th in the world has only 32 employees. It charges for job advertisements in 18 U.S. cities and $10 for apartment listings in New York as a way to meet expenses. AIM estimated the site's value at $1 billion, citing "untapped" commercial potential.

They would not have $1BN of untapped potential (i.e. unused ad real estate on their website) if their true motive were some version of "maximize shareholder value."

Well they can say that, but they generate around $100 million/yr in revenue. Compared to other internet companies, a value of 10x revenue isn't all that high. So they don't really have 1bn of untapped potential -- $100 million may be all that they can extract with that level of traffic.

For comparison, facebook had 1.1b in revenue last quarter (so lets say 4.4b/year).. and it's worth upwards of 100b.. which is 22.7x revenue.

So if that's the measure, then facebook is leaving MORE money on the table than Craig

Anyone who thinks they are going to start a service to replace facebook without making money their #1 priority is an idiot who will fail the moment they have to open a hundred million $ data center.

That is only true if the idea is to replace facebook with a facebook clone. That will never happen.

What could happen is a distributed social network. One of the most common effects of the internet has been disintermediation. The thing is that facebook itself is ripe for disintermediation - it has set itself up as the intermediary for hundreds of millions of people. But we don't need facebook to get between us and our friends.

I expect to see facebook left in the dustbin of internet history by software that runs mostly on our phones. It won't be much longer until phones will have terabytes of storage and constant high-bandwidth connections - even with cell tower bandwidth at such a premium, most people are within the range of a friendly wifi hotspot for the majority of their day. The need for centralization is practically over with already. You can host your "wall" and your photo albums and whatever other media you want directly on your phone and you'll get 100% of what makes facebook valuable to 99% of its users without all of the pandering to Big Data's stalking addiction.

All it is going to take is a good quality phone-centric social network app and facebook will shrivel up and blow the way of myspace and geocities.

Probably there will be something new sooner or later, but centralised systems like Facebook have advantages.

Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it. Having it on a centralised server negates these issues: always available, always fast. Reliability of an organised centrailised system is better than that of a disorganised de

Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it.

Your premise is something I addressed in my original post - most people are within wifi range most of the time so data limits are only applicable to "life-line" situations. Even today, over 100 million US residents own smartphones. [comscore.com] I don't think it is a stretch to say that once you eliminate people who don't use social networking, that 100+ million smartphone users starts to look like at least 75% of the remaining population and those numbers will only increase as time passes.

Contact management, searching for friends, etc: we all know how well search works on a fully decentralised system like Gnutella. Without centralised index search just doesn't scale well.

The vast majority of searches for Facebook you don't see as they are db calls: every single item in your news feed, every single comment on those items, who liked them, etc: that are all searches. And that's going to take a hell of a long time to collect over such a network. It's not even a search for a specific item like a file name; it's a database query that has to be handled and interpreted by every single node.

And trust me: for many people it matters a lot whether it's near real time as it's now, vs. h

I expect to see facebook left in the dustbin of internet history by software that runs mostly on our phones.

I agree with you except this part. It will take a while to get it to you, but it will not just involve phones (which can 'die', or get lost far too easily). The software will run mostly on your home PC -- All the hard stuff anyway, like data synchronisation and storage. Phones will get more powerful, but so will PCs. The notion of a "client" and "server" are irrelevant -- That's much higher level distinction than needed, but if I must apply these horrible terms which are used to limit your use of techn

So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.

Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.

In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.

While I agree that the new features are silly and a thinly veiled attempt at capitalizing upon the public, shall we all remember that when we post things on Facebook, we are voluntarily using a free service on the Internet? At any point we are all free to delete our account, ignore the parts we don't like, or otherwise not participate in it as a social networking site.

Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!

I don't know about *posts*, however I do know that Facebook does not always show your *likes* to friends. I'm not talking about likes of someone's status where it'd be understandable if your friend couldn't see it because he's not a friend of the friend whose status you liked. I'm talking about your likes of pages or comments on pages or links, where ALL of your friends should be able to see those likes. How do I know that not all of my likes are seen by my friends? Because I created a second facebook a

And, inevitably, if you want a business that can sustain itself it needs revenue. If you don't pay for it, advertisers are paying and you're actually the product.

As sad as it is, facebook would probably have to be a whole lot more honest and respectful of your data if they charged you to use their service than when they're trying to eek out every penny of advertising dollars.

Facebook sustains itself because users are too cheap to cough up cash up front (and probably legitimately too skeptical of any new so

There will be a massive push to drive up Facebooks income by any means possible to ramp up the valuation of the company regardless of the consequences. Choke the chicken too hard and it never comes it just dies.

That's exactly what is, repeat, is going to happen. They will use Facebook shares as junk bonds to buy in revenue by buying other tech companies and then market that as increased revenue, they will add new charges everywhere they can think of and they will push against people's addictio

Remember AOL, Myspace, ICQ, MSN etc, they all had a huge userbase, were seen as invincible and they all more or less crashed when they tried to cash in in a market where they were no longer the leaders in innovation.

The mob is fickle, brother. Ten years ago Myspace didn't even exist yet, and it hasn't been relevant in years now. C'est la vie...

Anyone that expects different with Facebook is delusional. I would honestly not be surprised if a full third of the user accounts on Facebook are either abandoned completely or aren't accessed but a few times a month at the most. I don't know what's going to be the dominant social network in 5 years...but I seriously doubt it's going to be Facebook.

It started about a couple years ago, I missed some big announcements from close friends, and found out that FB started limiting the news feed to only certain friends' statuses. There was temporarily an option to expand it to everyone again, but that disappeared more than a year ago to. Now if you're narcissistic enough, you can ensure that your friends see your status message. FB will cease to become a source of communication soon because people like free, but they like free+works better, and there are other free communication methods that don't arbitrarily drop your messages and offer to charge you to resend them.

I expect this is more than anything for the share holders/soon to be share holders. They have to actually you know generate revenue and continue to find new ways to generating it etc. It will only get worse from here, I promise you. Facebook might not of once been a soulless corporation but it is now.

It's scary to think that one day people might look on the past years of Facebook as the good days of Facebook, when they really cared about their users and weren't just about extracting revenue from them...

There was a time when they were more focused on building their user base than (immediate) profits. They knew the network would only gain financial value when it had enough users to monetize, which it now does.

I bet people would pay $10/day for that feature.
Who searched for me, who viewed my profile, what part of my profile did they view?
To bad we are locked in to a proprietary social network that hides such information from the user...

Yes that would arguably kill the social networking site since people would be to paranoid to stalk...oh wait no it would not.

The best thing Facebook can do is begin paying people to post relevant news articles and popular stories on Facebook.They could make the money to pay them from ads, and most people get their news from Facebook.

I'm a news junkie, and I often listen to C-SPAN radio. Some shows have callers, most of whom are awful. "And next is Bob on the Independents line. Hi Bob, you're on. Uh, hi, am I on? Yes, Bob, you're on with us. Uh, hi, so, uh, thanks for, uh, having me on, I really like C-SPAN, uh, thanks for your service Congressman, and, uh, I'm calling to ask about..." by which point I'm already yelling in my car, "just ask your fucking question!" There are rewarding exceptions, but the norm is outspoken incoherence.

The best thing Facebook can do is begin paying people to post relevant news articles and popular stories on Facebook.

That's like saying people should be paid by the government for filling in their tax returns. The "users" aren't Facebook's customers, the advertisers are. The entire point is targetted advertising, the more information people post the more the adverts can be targetted and the more advertisers will pay. Facebook is an advertising platform, nothing more, the "social" aspect is just the hook to get the eyeballs to connect to the adverts.

That's like saying people should be paid by the government for filling in their tax returns. The "users" aren't Facebook's customers, the advertisers are. The entire point is targetted advertising, the more information people post the more the adverts can be targetted and the more advertisers will pay. Facebook is an advertising platform, nothing more, the "social" aspect is just the hook to get the eyeballs to connect to the adverts.

Facebook isn't a tax it's a community. We should be able to make money from our content.

One can understand Facebook's problem. Too many people use it. Too many posts are being created. Too many people miss most of what's there. Yes, it's just like Twitter.

If Facebook's layout did not stink this would not be an issue.
If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.

Instead I get this seemingly random arrangement of things on the main page and it takes me two clicks to even bring up a complete friend list which is arranged in no useful order.

I cannot wait for the day when we look back on Facebook like we did on proprietary email protocols and instant messaging protocols and have a beautiful selection of clients.
I am still looking forward to the day when all those services are easily host on servers that are not harvesting the average user's data...

I think it's deliberate obfuscation, myself. If it's easy to get right at the information you're seeking, then you're not spending all your time on Facebook, and we can't fucking have that, can we?

I never understood how people can stand shit like that. I admit, maybe it's my own low-level OCD when it comes to organization (you should see my media folder on my computer...impeccably tagged and sorted) but I cannot fucking stand the clusterfuck of crap that is the average Facebook wall these days. I haven't

If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.

I would love to see that! That, and an open protocol that you could use with various clients would make it truely useful. Still, I'd probably be better off just cancelling my acocunt like I've been threatening to do for a long time.

Want a larger title?Multiple colorsPictureshighlighted in the listing...

All of these cost a few cents extra to get more "eyeballs" to see your listing and then eventually to click on it and hopefully to buy the item(s) you're selling.

Always wondered why I couldn't format my FB posts with bold/italics or justifications (left/right/center). Now, I can see them saying, "You want bold... that will be $.05."

Of course it would be really slick to have a setting similar to what email clients have which is to display all email messages, regardless of formatting as "plain text". Thereby getting rid of all the formatting people have paid for and display it in plain text (like it is now).

Of course it would be really slick to have a setting similar to what email clients have which is to display all email messages, regardless of formatting as "plain text". Thereby getting rid of all the formatting people have paid for and display it in plain text (like it is now)

I could imagine giving Facebook users the ability to earn money too. Allow them to advertise for corporate sponsors.

Then they can use that money to get new features like freemium games do like League of Legends?

Ok I kid I kid, but here is a real idea I wish someone would go with:

Advertisement revenue sharing. Make a game or gameshow where everyone can compete.
Then when you play ads get shown. At the end of the month, some of the advertisement revenue is kept for the company, but a % of it goes ba

For only an extra few dollars a week, you can increase the size of your friend list!

Our friend-bots act just like the real thing! Check out this special pricing!

$1 Bob - Basic model, posts occasional but doesn't chat or play games$2 Frank - Posts regularly will play games but isn't available for chat$5 Jane - Posts constantly, plays games and is available for chat$50 Tina - The deluxe model! Complete with hot profile picture, private albu

It's very trendy to hate Facebook, and be proud of not having a profile. But for some of us (especially those of us who have non-techie friends spread across the world), it provides real value.

It lets you: 1) Find people (and be found by people) that you want to get back in contact with
2) Hold asynchronous, casual conversations with friends, and friends of friends. I don't know an existing solution which allows the same thing as smoothly.

a) lacked the time for itb) the constant privacy violations and promises to 'never do it again'c) several news reports on the very real risks to current and future employment of facebook posts.d) at the time, nothing like google circles so I couldn't keep the different parts of my life really separate. Also see b) - similar violations of cross friend discussion privacy in the past. I'm sorry- I just don't want to share every aspect of my beliefs with everyone.e) They are thinking of charging us? WE ARE THE PRODUCT. Without US, they are NOTHING.f) It was just taking too much time to keep up with "friends" that I really barely knew. I've started living life for real in the time that's been freed up. Seriously- it was something like 1.5 hours a day to keep up with facebook. I use that time to play board games in person, go on dates, take classes, walk, ride a bicycle, exercise.

I'm back to email, text messages, and personal phone calls. I've made new friends in real life who i see in person and do real activities with.

Facebook is a virtual experience lacking in reality.

Final reason I stopped hanging out in facebook... They wanted my personal mobile phone number to play the games. I hear since then, I could now play the games without facebook. Oh yea.. and CONSTANT spam to join "games" and events in "games" which I didn't give a darn about.

Once you get all those people on the site, you just must turn them into cash cows, instead of taking a decent payout in advertising. The MBAs just insist.

The result is that soon interacting with the site becomes a pain in the neck and the smart people leave. They are replaced by many, many more people, but we all know that the number of warm bodies is only part of the story.

When you lose those top echelon users, your site starts to become a virtual tenement. Soon it's a kicking around ground for the lost, like MySpace, Digg, and other dot-com burnouts.

Remember when the FB news feed used to list everyone's statuses? Then you had to explicitly tell it to show everything, and now even that option doesn't exist; you have to deal with whatever random crap shows up, missing important statuses. All the data's still there, but they needed an environment where there would be an artificial scarcity of statuses to make promoting one's own status on others' news feeds valuable enough to make people want to pay for it (although only the most narcissistic would want to).

I hated high school. Facebook is high school 2.0. Why wouldn't I want it to die a horrible death? Social networking is for people that lack actual lives. I guess based on their numbers there's nearly a billion of them. Somehow I get through my day without logging onto Facebook and I somehow have survived by not posting on the site. Does this make me "uncool"? God I hope to hell it does if posting makes you cool. I thought being cool was NOT doing what the sheep do?

Cool is what the cool kids do. As it has been, is, and always will be. If they smoke, smoking is cool. If they protest for the rain forest, that's cool too.

Not doing something different is cool, doing something new is. Identifying a trend and following it as the first person is cool. It would be even cooler to form a trend, but few people have that kind of spunk. Ok, let's do the "teenage guide to coolness".

First, attitude.

Act as if you would never follow some kind of trend like all the sheeple. Then find o